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December 10, 2012

By RFE/RL's Balkan Service

The group held a symbolic funeral for human rights in Sarajevo on December 10.

SARAJEVO – The Youth Initiative for Human Rights has staged mock burials in Bosnia-Herzegovina's three largest cities to mark international Human Rights Day.

In central Sarajevo, members of the group accompanied by a band playing funeral music marched through a pedestrian zone with a black coffin symbolizing the death of human rights.

One group member read a speech that said, "We are gathered here in order to bury human rights and freedom."

The speaker added that human rights don't exist in Bosnia.

Similar events were held in Banja Luka, the capital of the Bosnian Serb entity where ethnic Serbs are the majority, and in the ethnically divided city of Mostar, where the western part of the city is mainly inhabited by Bosnian Croats.